Bioshock Deep, Emergent AI for a First-Person Shooter

Bioshock, the game publishers called "just another f****** PC FPS," is now available as a downloadable demo on Xbox Live Marketplace. The full version will be available on both Xbox 360 and PC on Aug. 24.

 

Reviews for the upcoming science fiction first-person shooter are good. Official Xbox Magazine has it rated it at 100 per cent. Here's an excerpt from Metacritic.com.

 

What's so special about Bioshock?

 

Bioshock has been called a spiritual sequel to System Shock II. The team that developed SSII turned Bioshock into the game they really wanted to make. It's been in development for years and if reports of its depth of replay-ability and cutting-edge graphics are any indication, it shows.

 

You can expect this game to have a very deep interactive environment and AI. Players will be able to make choices that will affect the game-world around them.

 

Bioshock was developed to have a rich AI ecology, meaning elements in the game world will evolve around the player's choices. Only the deepest, most richly-detailed games possess this level of acumen called emergent gameplay – when players can delve so deep into the game environment that unexpected elements that weren't coded will emerge.

 

Think of it like this. The developers gave life to the game's environment but it continues to evolve on its own, constrained only by its own Artificial Intelligence. It's a fascinating level of detail to which few video games have ever aspired.

 

An article in ComputerandVideogames.com tells the story about how developers tried to shop Bioshock around and it came very close to NOT getting published. 

 

Essentially, publishers are the business side of the industry and most don't like to take big risks.

 

Bioshock's level of work and detail constitutes a big risk. Whether or not it will pay off for Take Two Interactive remains to be seen but we'll definitely take another look later this month.

2 comments
Posted by Wayde on August 16,2007 at 11:21 AM

The only real comparison we can make with System Shock II is that it's made by the same development team. Bioshock is supposedly the game they wanted SSII to be.

I really liked the the Bioshock Demo for its otherworldly art deco esthetics in the design. I know I can't handle more games though, I already want to play Stranglehold - Bioshock and of course Halo3. And I am still working on ranking up my super-team in Ultimate Alliance Hard mode. What a game that is!

Posted by Brando on August 16,2007 at 8:10 AM

Although you mention System Shock here, Wayde, I find Bioshock to be the long-lost son of the Clive Barker series.  Boasting psychic abilities and freakish, apocalyptic enemies, there's something very surreal and visceral about the experience.  Playing the demo, I even felt it had some generational ties to that PC freakshow, Blood.

Although the demo is impressive, clearly there's a lot we still haven't seen.  In fact, I'll be greedy enough to say that this 45 minute demo could use even more of those special abilities.  It relies too much on guns and wrenches, weapons that I can tell simply won't be central to the full version title.

Only thing I'm concerned about is this: Can I really handle two massive FPS' in just one month's time?  Let's not forget a late-September Halo release.